Papers › Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Unbiased Teacher for Semi-Supervised Object Detection

18 Feb 2021ICLR 2021 1arXiv:2102.09480archive 2025-07-28

Yen-Cheng Liu, Chih-Yao Ma, Zijian He, Chia-Wen Kuo, Kan Chen, Peizhao Zhang, Bichen Wu, Zsolt Kira, Peter Vajda

Semi-supervised learning, i.e., training networks with both labeled and unlabeled data, has made significant progress recently. However, existing works have primarily focused on image classification tasks and neglected object detection which requires more annotation effort. In this work, we revisit the Semi-Supervised Object Detection (SS-OD) and identify the pseudo-labeling bias issue in SS-OD. To address this, we introduce Unbiased Teacher, a simple yet effective approach that jointly trains a student and a gradually progressing teacher in a mutually-beneficial manner. Together with a class-balance loss to downweight overly confident pseudo-labels, Unbiased Teacher consistently improved state-of-the-art methods by significant margins on COCO-standard, COCO-additional, and VOC datasets. Specifically, Unbiased Teacher achieves 6.8 absolute mAP improvements against state-of-the-art method when using 1% of labeled data on MS-COCO, achieves around 10 mAP improvements against the supervised baseline when using only 0.5, 1, 2% of labeled data on MS-COCO.

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Code

facebookresearch/unbiased-teacher officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
hik-lab/ssod mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
hikvision-research/SSOD mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
yeonsikch/Unbiased-Teacher mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Image ClassificationObjectObject DetectionSemi-Supervised Object Detectionimage-classificationobject-detection

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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 0.5% labeled data Unbiased Teacher mAP 16.94± 0.23 #5 of 5 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 1% labeled data Unbiased Teacher mAP 20.75± 0.12 #15 of 22 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 10% labeled data Unbiased Teacher mAP 31.5± 0.10 #23 of 27 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 100% labeled data UNBIASED TEACHER mAP 41.3 #11 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 2% labeled data Unbiased Teacher mAP 24.324.30 ± 0.07 #19 of 19 Archive leaderboard report
Semi-Supervised Object Detection COCO 5% labeled data Unbiased Teacher mAP 28.27± 0.11 #20 of 23 Archive leaderboard report

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